


A Most Ingenious Paradox

by Zeborah



Series: The Time-Traveller's Ex-Husband [4]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aliens, F/M, Temporal Paradox, Timey-Wimey, totally not flirting whoops uh oh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 01:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30098049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeborah/pseuds/Zeborah
Summary: Hotch isn't sure what Melody meant by giving him a Christmas present that reminds him of when he first fell in love with her former incarnation. Anyway, things are complicated. There's an alien that could destroy all life on earth, an alternate-timeline-future-husband with motive to erase their son from history, and a family outing to a park with a little more family than anticipated.
Relationships: Aaron Hotchner/Haley Hotchner, Amy Pond/Rory Williams
Series: The Time-Traveller's Ex-Husband [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1994980
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	A Most Ingenious Paradox

"So," Jessica said one evening after they'd got Jack to bed, "what did you think of your Christmas present?"

"The tea towels?" Hotch said. "They're great. I definitely didn't have enough now I've got Jack, and eating at home more -- and he loves the dinosaurs--"

He'd been valiantly ignoring the Look she was giving him, but Brooks women did not give up that easily. "I meant the present Melody gave you."

The USB stick. Containing the bootleg recording, clearly made on a cellphone, of one of the first ever performances of a light opera from the nineteenth century. Specifically, the light opera Pirates of Penzance at whose high school rehearsal, a hundred and eight years later, a much younger Aaron Hotchner had fallen in love with his future wife -- twenty-two years before her murder and regeneration into this "Melody" who looked like she was barely out of high school even now.

_That_ Christmas present.

"To be honest," he said awkwardly, "I'm not sure what she meant by it."

The Look only grew more mordant. "Sure. What could she possibly have meant by it?"

Jessica had been a lot more sympathetic when they'd both thought her sister had been murdered and/or kidnapped.

When he didn't answer she said more gently, "Aaron, we both know you and Haley didn't separate because you stopped loving each other. Your job just got in the way."

"Well," he said over that old aching wound, something like having a knife pulled slowly out of his gut, "there's a lot more in the way now."

Her lips pressed out the wryest of wry smiles. Not that she was agreeing, exactly. But at least she stopped arguing.

*

After Christmas, Melody was invited to the Brooks family New Year's dinner; and after that, no Saturday lunch was complete without a visit from the time-traveller. And, one week, a companion on her shoulder. Hotch was still trying to figure out whether it was a parrot, a monkey, or an item of clothing like the snake-belt, when Melody darted him an irritated look. "What?"

"Is it a dragon?" Jack asked curiously, which was another reasonable hypothesis.

"Is what--" She craned her neck and must have caught a glimpse of it, because then she said, "Oh, fudge. --Are all the windows shut?"

"It's the middle of winter," Jessica pointed out, coming in from the kitchen with a covered casserole dish.

"It is?" Melody asked with an abstracted glance out the nearest window at the snow-laden trees. "Better shut the door behind you anyway. Okay, here's the plan: Aaron, you distract him with that poinsettia, and Jessica grab him under the wings. Not the tail!" she added urgently.

Her tone suggested it was better to follow orders first, ask questions later. Hotch fetched the potted poinsettia from the side-table. Jessica put down her dish of vegetables and eyed the creature, asking as she approached, "Why, does it come off?"

"He doesn't like it," Melody said. "One... two..."

Hotch readied the poinsettia; Jessica readied her hands. Then abruptly the creature leapt, webbed limbs outstretched (a flying fox?) onto the poinsettia. Hotch managed not to drop the increased weight. Maybe he could shift the pot to one hand and grab the creature -- but a second later it had leapt again, over his shoulder to a bookshelf, leaving an empty pot of soil in his hands. He turned just in time to see the last poinsettia leaves disappear into the creature's stomach before it preened and its breast scales smoothed back into place over the opening. Okay, he decided, so it was a starfish now.

"That's not good," Melody said. "We _cannot_ let him escape."

"It'd definitely startle the horses," Hotch agreed, calculating its speed -- his own speed -- their respective locations -- the places its eyes tracked. Its yawn. It had just eaten: if it needed time to digest, maybe its reflexes would be slowed.

"Plus he'll destroy all life on Earth. Okay--"

" _What_?"

"Daddy, I catch him!" Jack declared, swinging the empty toy hamper into play. It was a good idea. Unfortunately the creature's reflexes were still sharper than a four-year-old's: it (he?) leaped away in the nick of time and bounded behind the sofa instead.

Hotch barely restrained Jack from diving after it. "Melody," he started very carefully.

"Oh, relax, he only eats plants, and it's not like any of _us_ can fit under the sofa. Go on, Jack. If you can't get him under the wings, go for the back of his neck."

Jack gleefully obeyed. Hotch repeated, "Melody."

She rolled her eyes. "It was a mistake, okay? I thought I put him back in his habitat, obviously he figured out the lock. It'll be fine: we'll catch him, I'll take him home, and I'll be back in time for dinner."

"Got him!" Jack announced gleefully. A moment later the creature darted out and flew up to perch on the hanging light fitting. A moment after that, Jack wiggled out from under the sofa with the creature in hand. A somewhat smaller creature than the one above them.

"He," Hotch said flatly.

Melody looked a little sheepish. "They can reproduce asexually. When food is plentiful."

"They're gremlins," he concluded at the same time as Jessica said, "Like tribbles."

"They're patambeest from Raxacoricofallapatorius," Melody said, taking the newborn before Jack could lose his grip. "The Slitheen nearly hunted them to extinction, then the Blathereen got the brilliant idea to farm them instead, only they discovered the rakweed they were feeding them was a more profitable crop. They were..." She glanced sideways at a wide-eyed Jack. "'Liquidating the excess stock' so I... liberated some."

Hotch opened his mouth, and on second thought closed it again. On third thought he asked, "Is he going to keep reproducing?"

"Only if he gets more to eat," she said. As if in answer, the patambeest dropped onto Jessica's casserole dish, knocked the crockery lid aside, and swallowed its contents whole.

By the time they'd contained the patambeest, there were four of them, the wicker toy hamper had a large hole chewed in the bottom, and Jack had knocked over a wide range of knick-knacks in his excited attempts to help.

"What on earth is going on in here?" Barbara asked. She and Roy were bearing in the roast chicken and potatoes, as Melody disappeared out to her old bedroom with the parent patambeest in one hand and the three babies in the casserole dish wedged firmly under the other arm.

"We're catching patambeest!" Jack exclaimed.

Over his head, Jessica and Hotch's eyes met in wordless agreement that her mother didn't need any more science-fiction in her life than necessary. "Sorry, Mom," Jessica said, "we just got a bit carried away."

"We've finished playing now, haven't we, Jack?" Hotch added. "Let's quickly pick up so we can eat."

And a moment later Melody was back with the vegetables, and when Barbara frowned in confusion at the peas Jessica quickly explained that she'd added them to the pot herself, so dinner was enjoyed by all.

*

He was with Dave, slaving over boxes of white collar files in Florida, when his phone rang. "Hotchner," he answered it automatically.

"Is this a good time?"

Melody. Speaking of wanted fugitives. "Uh." He stood, moving into the corner of the room for the illusion of privacy as he shifted his brain to another gear. "No. We're going to be at least another day."

"You're on a case?"

"Yeah." But that didn't mean she couldn't visit and see Jack. If he could just work out a way to tell her Jessica was in the apartment without tipping off Rossi that it wasn't Jessica on the phone... "Um, there's fish fingers..."

She laughed. "If Jessica's fish fingers, does that make me custard?"

"Well, you're not crumby."

She laughed again in delight, and he had to suck a smile off his own lips, aware Dave was still in the room. "See you Saturday lunch?"

"Yeah," he said, and went back to his tower of financial records.

Dave, eyes on his own pile, nevertheless commented, "It's a bit late for Jack's dinner, isn't it?"

"We're still struggling with his routine sometimes," Hotch said.

"Ah. You're lucky you've got Jessica to help out."

"Very lucky," he agreed gratefully. Even aside from practical matters, he'd never have been able to cope emotionally with her sister's reincarnation without her support.

Dave nodded -- a little slowly, perhaps? But when Hotch flicked his eyes sideways at him, he was writing something in his notebook in red.

He was working the case. Like Hotch should be, he told himself, and got back to it.

*

"Why do you always wear the same clothes?" Jack asked Melody.

He had a point. After the first weeks, where every visit had been in some wildly different variation on the theme of _skirts_ , she'd finally settled on a single style -- or more specifically, a single outfit.

Of course it wasn't one Hotch or even her former self Haley would have chosen. The chunky watch she called a "vortex manipulator" was a given. The black flat-heeled ankle boots were as practical as stylish; the long black scarf might warm her neck though she mostly wore it as a loose boa or a hair tie; the black belt bore loops for her ubiquitous vivid marker and what Hotch tried not to notice looked like an admittedly empty holster.

And then there was a sleeveless, sequined top, and a knee-length skirt that resembled a kilt in the same way a disco ball resembled a lampshade: both sequins above the belt and pleats below gleamed in a rainbow-spanning array of jewel tones.

Faced with Jack's curiosity she flashed a brassy smile. "Because I love them so much!"

Hotch felt his face freeze at that echo of Haley's -- of her last words to Jack as Haley. Even with her here in front of him... his body still remembered the panic, and the despair, and the stabbing pain at the crack of gunfire--

But "Oh," was all Jack said, and he went to rummage in the toy hamper. (Replaced now with a plastic one, and he wasn't allowed under the sofa anymore for fear of catching his fingers in Barbara's new mousetraps.)

Melody's smile faltered when she saw Hotch's face. Of course she remembered, too -- but a moment later the smile was back in place and she was cheerfully reminiscing with her father over his old shop.

It was a while before Hotch noticed Jack wasn't really playing with the toys. He excused them early to take him home for a nap. Jack came without protest, and sat so quietly in the car Hotch suspected he'd be asleep before they got there.

Only halfway home did Jack say suddenly, "Daddy, is Melody my mom?"

Hotch looked in startlement at his solemn face -- looked quickly back at the road in front of them -- and pulled over. He considered lying. Jack was only four years old; how on earth was he going to explain--? "Yes," he said instead, and stuck there.

"And she got a new name, and new hair, and a new house, because the bad guy wants to hurt her?"

"No," he said emphatically. "No-one's going to hurt her." But... the FBI, less accepting than a four-year-old of her regeneration, did have a warrant out for her arrest for her own abduction. Carefully he said, "But they might stop her visiting us, so we can't tell anybody. Only Jessica and Grandma and Grandad."

" _I_ understand, Daddy."

A four-year-old shouldn't understand that kind of secret. But he did, and Hotch ached to crush him to his chest. The seatbelts held them both in place, and he stroked his hair instead. "And you know she loves you very much. Just like I do."

"I love you too, Daddy. And I draw a picture for Mom, and I show her my zoo t-shirt, and my rocket ship, and--"

Hotch started to suspect that by the time they got home he was the one who'd be needing a nap.

*

Jack was still enthusiastically drawing pictures the next morning. While he was ensconced in his room, Hotch took his chance to catch up on housework.

He'd just folded a stack of t-shirts, with a mental note to make sure the zoo t-shirt somehow stayed clean for a week, when the doorbell rang. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses would be in church, he reasoned, so it must be Seventh Day Adventists. But the doorbell rang again when ignored, and when he opened it he found Melody looking as curious as he was.

"You said I should pop by," she explained. "Do you have a snack? I was ready for Saturday dinner."

He didn't remember saying any such thing. "I said, or I'm going to say?"

"Best not to get too hung up on tenses," she said with unjustified relish, heading into the kitchen. "And no, you didn't say why. Oh good, Cheerios."

As she made herself at home over breakfast, Hotch glanced down the hall to Jack's room. He'd closed the door while he'd been vacuuming, and it was still closed. Good. He did have things to talk with Melody about, after all, and it made sense to do that before Saturday dinner.

He was just working out how to broach it when -- well, she was eating rainbow Cheerios while wearing a rainbow-sequined top and rainbow-pleated skirt. She looked like a Saturday morning cartoon: anyone would be distracted. "Jack's got a point about your clothes," he said.

"They're brilliant clothes," she said indistinctly through a mouthful.

In the strictest sense of the word, he agreed silently. "It's just that the last time I saw you wearing the same dress three times in a row, it was because it was all the same day for you."

"That's literally the opposite--" She caught herself on her indignation, and switched to a more ironic, "You really think I've eaten five family dinners in one day and I'm still hungry? This body definitely needs more calories than the last one, but that's a bit much even for me."

The light-heartedness was as false as her brassiest smile. _Literally the opposite._ "So... how long has it been?"

As abruptly, she scowled into her cereal. "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

She shook her head in frustration. He waited, and she burst out, "I don't age like normal people, Aaron. It's not just when I was the Girl Who Made Everyone Wait. It could be decades before anyone even notices I'm any older, I don't even _know_ how long it takes to die of old age, and I didn't give up all my regenerations in this timeline. But Jack--"

When she stopped he filled in the blank: "They grow up so fast."

"Part of me wishes I could at least jump to when he's old enough to explain it all to him, but--"

"Melody--"

"I _know_ I can't, Aaron, this body's just _so impatient_ \--"

"Melody, he knows you're his mom. He worked it out for himself yesterday." She gaped at him, mouth forming and discarding several questions. "It's... probably what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Aaron!" She grabbed the ends of her scarf in emphasis of her broad gestures to face, skin, hair, voice. " _Look_ at me!"

"Well, you've changed your name and hair before. As far as he's concerned it's just another kind of WitSec."

"He really--?" Her thumb pointed back over her shoulder; a moment later she was out of her chair after it, and only caught herself at the door jamb. "How do we--?"

"Well, it's not like--" His phone chirped in his pocket and he dug it out. "--There's any precedent--" It was JJ, with three throat-slashings in Providence: in a laundromat, a restaurant, and just now a church. He shut his eyes. Why the hell hadn't his future self told her to come half an hour earlier?

And then he knew.

"No precedent, huh?" Melody said wryly.

"Would you mind?"

She blinked. "Mind?"

"Looking after him for a day or two. Jessica will still have to take him to preschool, but--"

"Looking after Jack?" she echoed, as if they had another son somewhere. "I don't-- It's been six _years_ since I was a mother. Or seven, I lost track going back and forth in the Hyades--"

He put that _seven years_ aside to process later. "Trust me, it's like riding a bike."

Jack had no such hesitations about the idea. He was still jumping for excitement when Hotch left, and Melody was catching him up and spinning him in circles. It had been a long time since Hotch had been able to make two people that happy. Years -- possibly ever. It felt good.

It was only in the parking lot at the Bureau, faced with Dave's raised eyebrows and curious, "You got here quick," that he remembered that he'd also just left his son in the care of a wanted fugitive....

Scrambling for an explanation, he came up with only, "Jessica was already there."

"Ah," said Dave with an emphasis that sounded like it meant something. But before Hotch could ask what, he changed the subject to, "So I suppose you haven't had time to catch up on this case either."

*

Three more murders in Providence before he came home to a happy Jack and glowing Melody. And at the end of the week another Saturday lunch, where he arrived early to catch her and suggest she pop by his apartment six days ago first.

"I should, or I did?"

"Best not to get too hung up on tenses," he quoted. She rolled her eyes at him, but duly punched something into her vortex manipulator and disappeared. She was back almost exactly a minute later, and he asked, "Technically isn't that a temporal paradox?"

"Isn't what a temporal paradox?" she asked blithely, all but skipping past him out to the dining room. "Jack! I missed you _so much_!"

"Mom!" Jack squealed, and jumped into her arms: it had after all been whole _days_ in the life of a four-year-old. But Melody too caught him like a starving woman rationing her last crumbs....

And at the table, Barbara dropped her handful of silverware with a clatter. She was staring at the pair in dismay: at that _Mom_. Apparently she was still struggling more than she let herself show with thinking of this young Black woman as Jack's mother, her daughter. Jessica reached her and led her soothingly back to the kitchen.

" _Technically_ it's a temporal paradox," Melody said, having apparently sifted her memories back however many months ago. "But no-one really cares about stable causal loops."

*

Another Saturday lunch, and a kidnapping right in the middle of it. Children and crematoriums should not mix -- but Jack was safe in the combined care of Melody and Jessica, and finally the case was over and Hotch could come home.

To find a blue telephone box in the hall outside his apartment, and the sound of raised voices inside.

One hand by his Glock, he tested the door handle. Unsnibbed, it opened onto Melody's vehement, "For the last time, I'm not killing you!"

"Nngg!" returned the man in the red bow tie. "What is it about 'fixed point in time' that's so hard to understand?"

The two stood furiously nose to nose, but neither showed any sign of being about to raise a hand to the other. Hotch kept his own hand provisionally off his gun, instead tossing his ready-bag to one side and kicking the door shut behind himself with a pointed bang.

It got their attention: two faces turned to him to demand in unison, "What?"

He met the man's glare for a deliberate moment before looking to Melody. "Where's Jack?"

"Jessica took him to the park when _this one_ showed up."

" _This one_?" the man echoed indignantly.

Hotch looked back to him. "What are you doing here?"

He drew himself up to his full gawky height and tugged self-importantly at his bow tie. "I had some things to discuss with my wife."

Melody retorted, "I'm not your--"

"Future wife," he amended quickly.

"In your--"

"Alternate timeline, yes, yes. Point being, things to discuss. Important, temporal emergency things. What are _you_ doing here?" he counter-attacked.

"It's my apartment," Hotch said. It had been one thing hearing Amy call Melody the Doctor's wife when he hadn't really believed Haley _was_ Melody; quite another now hearing it from the man himself. He added pointedly, "And our son's."

"Right, you're the _ex_ -husband."

"Oh my god, _men_ ," Melody muttered. "I need a drink."

Hotch spared half a glance after her as she turned for the kitchen before replying, "And you're the Doctor. But in my understanding a stable time loop isn't any cause for concern."

"Who said anything about a stable causal loop? This is a highly _un_ stable, gapingly open-ended consistency paradox. She's trying to rewrite a fixed point in time. The entire fabric of reality is going to fall apart! _That woman_ is a walking, talking timebomb!" He paused as if waiting for this to have an effect, then abruptly scowled in the direction of the kitchen. "Are you even listening to me?"

"She's gone," Hotch said.

"She can't be, she was just getting a drink."

"Maybe, but she's got a vortex manipulator and she knows I don't keep alcohol in the kitchen."

"What's alcohol got to do with this? Don't you understand what's at stake here? Argh -- I don't have time to--"

Hotch blocked his attempt to leave by the simple expedient of not moving away from the door. "You're a time traveller and I'm standing between you and your time machine: _you've got time_. There are thousands of ways you can fake your own death--"

"Who told--"

"You're not worried about that, and you're not worried about any of the other paradoxes caused by the change in timelines, because they can all be fixed in their own time. What you're worried about is that she's not acting like the Melody Pond you knew -- and that's because she's not the Melody Pond you knew."

"She _is_ Melody."

"But she's also Haley, and you're going to have to accept that."

The Doctor lifted a finger as if to object; shook it at him for a moment; then admitted ruefully, "You're not as stupid as you look. I'm still not a fan of that," he added, wrinkling his nose at the sidearm. 

"It's not pointed at you this time," Hotch said, and moved away from the door. "But you should probably know there's a warrant out for your arrest."

The Doctor looked smug. "Oh, there's a lot more than one," he said on his way out. The door shut; a beat later re-opened. "If she comes back, tell her-- Never mind, I'll find her."

It shut again, and this time stayed shut. Through it he heard faintly the same whooping roar he'd heard when the blue box had appeared and disappeared in the interrogation room. Just to be sure, he snibbed the lock and put the chain on, then turned back to the kitchen door.

Melody, leaning on the jamb, cracked open a can of Red Bull from the fridge. "You know you're kind of hot when you're lecturing the Doctor."

"Not too alpha male?"

"Mm, maybe just the right amount of alpha male." She lifted her energy drink to that smirk -- Haley and not Haley; young and... by now, counting her time as the Girl Who Made Everyone Wait and her years travelling around the Hyades, probably a good fifteen years older than him. A consistency paradox.

"What's really at stake here?" he asked.

"You mean the fabric of reality disintegrating thread by blah blah blah?" she asked in unconcern, strolling towards him. "Or do you mean... _here_?"

He stopped her hand on its way to his chest. "I mean--" Their fingers tangled: Haley's touch, and not, and his throat tightened. Part of him still wanted to protect her from even thinking about this, but with Amy Brooks dead, Melody was the only one who could answer his questions. He asked, "If the Doctor wanted to stop all the paradoxes before they began, what's to keep him from stopping Amy finding you in 1969?"

She fell back, mouth open in indignation. Not at him, he thought. At the thought of never growing up with Amy and Rory; with Roy and Barbara and Jessica; of never meeting Hotch and above all, above the fabric of reality itself, _never having Jack_. "No. He wouldn't do that to... to her. --Anyway there's some kind of timelock," she added uncertainly. "And even if he did, Nan would remember. She always remembers -- and she'd find him in Leadworth in 1996 and-- Oh crap, I've forgotten to get her and Pops together. Do you have Facebook? Of course you don't. Never mind, I'll make a fake profile."

And in a flurry of buttons on her vortex manipulator, she was gone.

Hotch phoned Jessica on his way to put his weapons in their locker. At least for now Jack was still safely in existence.

*

" _Please_ can Mom come to the park?" Jack begged.

Hotch was halfway into yet another patient explanation that Melody really couldn't be seen in public with them when she cut in with a breezy, "I've got a time machine. What the hell? Let's do it." Hotch turned an incredulous look over his shoulder, but she only added, "Pardon my French."

Jack was already jumping up and down, cheering. Hotch got up, took Melody's arm, and steered her out from the awkward looks among her parents and Jessica, and into her old bedroom.

"Mm, doubling down on the alpha male," she teased: "I think I--"

He shut the door and said quietly, "You're _not_ taking Jack time travelling."

"You can come too."

"No."

"It's perfectly safe--"

"That's why you carry a gun?" he asked with a pointed look at her empty holster.

"That's not for the time travelling, it's for... Anyway, there's lots of safe time periods." Under Hotch's gaze she changed tack. "I've already told him we can go, I can't just--"

"Yes, you can. He'll be upset, but he'll get over it. It'd _help_ if you say goodbye before you leave this time."

"Oh, like you're one to talk!"

He pressed his lips together for a (very rapid) count to ten. Getting sidetracked into old marital squabbles wasn't going to help anything. Searching for a compromise, he reluctantly came up with, "I'll look around for a park we can meet at without attracting attention--"

"Canada," Melody suggested. "Or the UK. It travels in space too," she explained with a wave of her vortex manipulator.

He still didn't like it. But... she was trying to meet him halfway, and it _would_ be safer outside of the USA's jurisdiction. "No time travel," he said.

"Well, maybe a few hours." She opened her eyes innocently wide. "Time zones, Aaron: we don't want to arrive in the middle of the night."

So against his better judgement they ended up in some little village in England, in an even littler playground with one slide and one set of swings on which Jack showed no sign of tiring of being pushed by his mother.

It wasn't so bad, Hotch had to admit as he watched. The jump had been... jolting, but he'd had worse turbulence in the jet, and Jack had only giggled as if Melody had tossed him up in the air. Now, if he made himself forget how they'd got here, it was a perfectly ordinary, somewhat cloudy, afternoon in the park. And if worst came to worst and Melody disappeared again... well, he had his phone and wallet: he could always get Jessica to courier their passports over, make their way to London, and be back in DC in time for work on Monday.

"Hey, Rainbow Girl!" a voice called.

Melody turned; called back, "Nan and Pops! Hi!" As she waved to the young couple -- a red-haired woman and a blond man in some kind of scrubs -- she said aside to Hotch, "They think it's just a nickname."

He kept his face and voice carefully neutral. "This is Amy and Rory's hometown."

"Leadworth, yeah. Didn't I say?"

She knew very well that if she'd said, he'd have put his foot down. "We're going to talk about this later."

Introductions followed, and congratulations when Amy (Pond) showed off her engagement ring to Melody's great delight. When questions about what the obviously American Hotch and Jack were doing in the UK, let alone with Melody, exhausted his stock of casual answers, he excused himself to a nearby icecream van.

Rory (Williams) joined him while he was contemplating the menu. "The tutti frutti's good."

Hotch grimaced. "This is going to sound stupid, but do you have change for US dollars?"

"Oh, I'll get it," Rory said at once, and wouldn't be persuaded to take the dollars. Hotch accepted his recommendation of the tutti frutti, and he ordered five. A brief awkward silence fell while they waited, then Rory filled it with, "Did Mels say she's actually the one who got Amy and me together?"

"She said something about matchmaking," Hotch said.

"She reckons if she didn't say anything we'd be in a resthome before we figured it out. That's why she calls us Nan and Pops."

Hotch noted something uncertain in his expression. "You disagree?"

"Well, I mean, I always knew. That I loved Amy, I mean. It was just, there was this other guy, and he wasn't around long but she was really disappointed when he left, so I thought.... Anyway," he concluded with a with a self-deprecatory shrug.

"You know what I notice," Hotch said -- because if they were matchmaking between Jack's grandparents anyway then they might as well go whole hog -- "is even though we're waiting for this ice cream you're standing so you can keep watching her in your peripheral vision." Rory flushed furiously. "And even though she's talking with Melody, she's standing the same way, so she can keep watching you."

And of course Rory looked, and Amy saw him and instantly flashed him a smile, and he was startled into such a wonderingly wide grin that he never noticed Melody and Hotch sharing their own smile at the sight -- let alone thought to ask how _they'd_ been standing, to see all that and each other as well from their own peripheral vision....

*

Morgan was just pulling up to the airstrip to go home from their next case when Hotch got off the phone for the last time. Good news for once: "Jodi's aunt's made contact," he told Morgan and Dave. "She and her sister were estranged -- she didn't even know Jodi existed until she saw this all on the news, but she's going to look after her now."

"Thank God for aunts," Dave said.

"Yeah." They piled out, grabbing ready bags and signing the SUV back over to the local field agents. Prentiss, Reid and JJ were doing the same ahead of them. Hotch shook a last hand and followed the team across the tarmac to the plane.

Dave was still at his side. "You've got to wonder what would have happened if she'd been around before Wade started looking for maternal subsitutes on the highway."

That was the last thing anyone would be wondering. And his tone was a very knowing shade of neutral: Hotch looked sideways at his face and saw the same non-expression there. This wasn't about the case. "What are you saying?"

"You've been getting close to Jessica recently."

Hotch eyed the distance to the jet's stairs, and the team bunching as they climbed them. He didn't want to make himself conspicuous by stopping in his tracks, but he slowed his pace, and lowered his voice. "She's helping a lot with Jack. Just like she helped Haley."

"Aaron," Dave murmured back, "I know you. You wouldn't be dealing with everything this well if that was all there was to it. And I'm not judging," he forged on before Hotch could even think of a sharp reply. "I'm just saying be careful. That's the kind of relationship that can get very complicated, very fast."

He wasn't wrong about that part. And they'd paused at the bottom of the stairs, making it very obvious that Hotch still wasn't looking his best friend in the eye. What was he meant to say? _Actually it's not Jessica I'm getting close to -- it's the number one suspect for the theft of her sister's corpse._ But he was keeping too much secret from his team already. Another lie -- and so blatant a lie -- would be downright dangerous.

"I know," he said finally. "And nothing's happened." And he went on up into the jet determined to keep it that way.


End file.
